Give Thanks
Nov 24, 2016 19:22:54 GMT -5
Post by Michael Downing on Nov 24, 2016 19:22:54 GMT -5
It was a day of family gathering and giving thanks at The End of The Road Sanctuary where we live. Long before we sat down to enjoy a plentiful dinner together there were chores to be done. The wood from several trees that had been felled had to be hauled to outside the wood shed for next year's wood supply. The area where they had been cut and the stumps had been ground was disc harrowed for replanting. As family gathered some decided to retire to the range for target practice. I was on the back deck but could hear the constant bang/ping as they worked their way down the metal target range at the back of the property behind the pond.
We had a very full meal and enjoyed our time together with three generations present. I had to make the 90 minute trip to Winston/Salem earlier this week for my son to have dental surgery and while I spent almost three hours waiting in the waiting room I went through almost every magazine they had. In November's issue of Southern Living I found a recipe for sweet and spicy turkey. When I got home I mentioned it to my wife and we decided to give it a try for a change this year. I must say it was the best turkey I have ever had and most of the crowd today agreed. The recipe can be found on line.
I hope all had a day to remember. While there is much wrong with the world and the country today we still have much to be thankful for. We have family and friends and a Sanctuary that should help sustain us in the troubled days ahead. I am thankful to be relatively healthy for my age and the ability to resist further infringements on our freedoms. I hope we are able to end this fight in my time so that my children and grandchildren will be able to live in peace. That is probably a vain hope so I can only wish to pass the will to fight for what matters onto my children and grandchildren and I expressed just that at the dinner table after we gave thanks.
Please read it all. It has been my contention for sometime that the bait and switch when they called to amend the Articles of Confederation and gave us the Constitution was the beginning of our downfall. As wondrous as the Constitution was it was doomed to fail.
h/t WRSA
virginiafreemen.com/2016/11/24/give-thanks/
Give Thanks
We have much to be thankful for. For family, for our birthright given to us by better men than we, and the innumerable ways the Almighty has blessed us. I want to thank all of you for reading and being the best audience a man could ask for, particularly those who have provided feedback and championed me to your friends, family and everyone else.
Today I bring to you the writings of a wiser man, with prescient words about what would befall his beloved countrymen nearly two hundred and thirty years later. Samuel Bryan is probably one of the most brilliant men you have never heard of and a principal anti-Federalist. If you read nothing else, read this today. Emphasis in bold is my own. Enjoy.
“Centinel”
Number 1
October 5, 1787
To the Freemen of Pennsylvania.
Friends, Countrymen and Fellow Citizens,
Permit one of yourselves to put you in mind of certain liberties and privileges secured to you by the constitution ofthis commonwealth, and to beg your serious attention to his uninterested opinion upon the plan of federal government submitted to your consideration, before you surrender these great and valuable privileges up forever. Your present frame of government, secures to you a right to hold yourselves, houses, papers and possessions free from search and seizure, and therefore warrants granted without oaths or affirmations first made, affording sufficient foundation for them, whereby any officer or messenger may be commanded or required to search your houses or seize your persons or property, not particularly described in such warrant, shall not be granted. Your constitution further provides “that in controversies respecting property, and in suits between man and man, the parties have a right to trial by jury, which ought to be held sacred.” It also provides and declares. “that the people have a right ofFREEDOM OF SPEECH, and of WRITING and PUBLISHING their sentiments, therefore THE FREEDOM OF THE PRESS OUGHT NOT TO BE RESTRAINED. ” The constitution of Pennsylvania is yet in existence, as yet you have the right to freedom of speech, and of publishing your sentiments. How long those rights will appertain to you, you yourselves are called upon to say, whether your houses shall continue to be your castles; whether your papers, your persons and your property, are to be held sacred and free from general warrants, you are now to determine. Whether the trial by jury is to continue as your birth-right, the freemen of Pennsylvania, nay, of all America, are now called upon to declare.
Without presuming upon my own judgement, I cannot think it an unwarrantable presumption to offer my private opinion, and call upon others for their’s, and if I use my pen with the boldness of a freeman, it is because I know that the liberty of the press yet remains unviolated, and juries yet are judges.
The late convention have submitted to your consideration a plan of a new federal government — The subject is highly interesting to your future welfare — Whether it be calculated to promote the great ends of civil society, viz. the happiness and prosperity of the community; it behoves you well to consider, uninfluenced by the authority of names. Instead of that frenzy of enthusiasm, that has actuated the citizens of Philadelphia, in their approbation of the proposed plan, before it was possible that it could be the result of a rational investigation into its principles; it ought to be dispassionately and deliberately examined, and its own intrinsic merit the only criterion of your patronage. If ever free and unbiased discussion was proper or necessary, it is on such an occasion. — All the blessings of liberty and the dearest privileges of freemen, are now at stake and dependent on your present conduct. Those who are competent to the task of developing the principles of government, ought to be encouraged to come forward, and thereby the better enable the people to make a proper judgment; for the science of government is so abstruse, that few are able to judge for themselves: without such assistance the people are too apt to yield an implicit assent to the opinions of those characters, whose abilities are held in the highest esteem, and to those in whose integrity and patriotism they can confide: not considering that the love of domination is generally in proportion to talents, abilities, and superior acquirements; and that the men of the greatest purity of intention may be made instruments of despotism in the hands of the artful and designing. If it were not for the stability and attachment which time and habit gives to forms of government it would be in the power of the enlightened and aspiring few, if they should combine, at any time to destroy the best establishments, and even make the people the instruments of their own subjugation.
The late revolution having effaced in a great measure all former habits, and the present institutions are so recent, that there exists not that great reluctance to innovation, so remarkable in old communities, and which accords with reason, for the most comprehensive mind cannot foresee the full operation of material changes-on civil polity; it is the genius of the common law to resist innovation.
The wealthy and ambitious, who in every community think they have a right to lord it over their fellow creatures, have availed themselves, very successfully, of this favorable disposition; for the people thus unsettled in their sentiments, have been prepared to accede to any extreme of government; all the distresses and difficulties they experience, proceeding from various causes, have been ascribed to the impotency of the present confederation, and thence they have been led to expect full relief from the adoption of the proposed system of government, and in the other event, immediately ruin and annihilation as a nation. These characters flatter themselves that they have lulled all distrust and jealousy of their new plan, by gaining the concurrence of the two men in whom America has the highest confidence, and now triumphantly exult in the completion of their long meditated schemes of power and aggrandisement. I would be very far from insinuating that the two illustrious personages alluded to, have not the welfare of their country at heart, but that the unsuspecting goodness and zeal of the one, has been imposed on, in a subject of which he must be necessarily inexperienced, from his other arduous engagements; and that the weakness and indecision attendant on old age, has been practiced on in the other.
I am fearful that the principles of government inculcated in Mr. Adams’s treatise, and enforced in the numerous essays and paragraphs in the newspapers, have misled some well designing members of the late Convention. — But it will appear in the sequel, that the construction of the proposed plan of government is infinitely more extravagant.
I have been anxiously expecting that some enlightened patriot would, ere this, have taken up the pen to expose the futility, and counteract the baneful tendency of such principles. Mr. Adams’s sine qua non of a good government is three balancing powers, whose repelling qualities are to produce an equilibrium of interests, and thereby promote the happiness of the whole community. He asserts that the administrators of every government, will ever be actuated by views of private interest and ambition, to the prejudice of the public good; that therefore the only effectual method to secure the rights of the people and promote their welfare, is to create an opposition of interests between the members of two distinct bodies, in the exercise of the powers of government, and balanced by those of a third. This hypothesis supposes human wisdom competent to the task of instituting three co-equal orders in government, and a corresponding weight in the community to enable them respectively to exercise their several parts, and whose views and interests should be so distinct as to prevent a coalition of any two of them for the destruction of the third. Mr. Adams, although he has traced the constitution of every form of government that ever existed, as far as history affords materials, has not been able to adduce a single instance of such a government; he indeed says that the British constitution is such in theory, but this is rather a confirmation that his principles are chimerical and not to be reduced to practice. If such an organization of power were practicable, how long would it continue? not a day — for there is so great a disparity in the talents, wisdom and industry of mankind, that the scale would presently preponderate to one or the other body, and with every accession of power the means of further increase would be greatly extended. The state of society in England is much more favorable to such a scheme of government than that of America. There they have a powerful hereditary nobility, and real distinctions of rank and interests; but even there, for want of that perfect equallity of power and distinction of interests, in the three orders of government, they exist but in name; the only operative and efficient check, upon the conduct of administration, is the sense of the people at large.
We had a very full meal and enjoyed our time together with three generations present. I had to make the 90 minute trip to Winston/Salem earlier this week for my son to have dental surgery and while I spent almost three hours waiting in the waiting room I went through almost every magazine they had. In November's issue of Southern Living I found a recipe for sweet and spicy turkey. When I got home I mentioned it to my wife and we decided to give it a try for a change this year. I must say it was the best turkey I have ever had and most of the crowd today agreed. The recipe can be found on line.
I hope all had a day to remember. While there is much wrong with the world and the country today we still have much to be thankful for. We have family and friends and a Sanctuary that should help sustain us in the troubled days ahead. I am thankful to be relatively healthy for my age and the ability to resist further infringements on our freedoms. I hope we are able to end this fight in my time so that my children and grandchildren will be able to live in peace. That is probably a vain hope so I can only wish to pass the will to fight for what matters onto my children and grandchildren and I expressed just that at the dinner table after we gave thanks.
Please read it all. It has been my contention for sometime that the bait and switch when they called to amend the Articles of Confederation and gave us the Constitution was the beginning of our downfall. As wondrous as the Constitution was it was doomed to fail.
h/t WRSA
virginiafreemen.com/2016/11/24/give-thanks/
Give Thanks
We have much to be thankful for. For family, for our birthright given to us by better men than we, and the innumerable ways the Almighty has blessed us. I want to thank all of you for reading and being the best audience a man could ask for, particularly those who have provided feedback and championed me to your friends, family and everyone else.
Today I bring to you the writings of a wiser man, with prescient words about what would befall his beloved countrymen nearly two hundred and thirty years later. Samuel Bryan is probably one of the most brilliant men you have never heard of and a principal anti-Federalist. If you read nothing else, read this today. Emphasis in bold is my own. Enjoy.
“Centinel”
Number 1
October 5, 1787
To the Freemen of Pennsylvania.
Friends, Countrymen and Fellow Citizens,
Permit one of yourselves to put you in mind of certain liberties and privileges secured to you by the constitution ofthis commonwealth, and to beg your serious attention to his uninterested opinion upon the plan of federal government submitted to your consideration, before you surrender these great and valuable privileges up forever. Your present frame of government, secures to you a right to hold yourselves, houses, papers and possessions free from search and seizure, and therefore warrants granted without oaths or affirmations first made, affording sufficient foundation for them, whereby any officer or messenger may be commanded or required to search your houses or seize your persons or property, not particularly described in such warrant, shall not be granted. Your constitution further provides “that in controversies respecting property, and in suits between man and man, the parties have a right to trial by jury, which ought to be held sacred.” It also provides and declares. “that the people have a right ofFREEDOM OF SPEECH, and of WRITING and PUBLISHING their sentiments, therefore THE FREEDOM OF THE PRESS OUGHT NOT TO BE RESTRAINED. ” The constitution of Pennsylvania is yet in existence, as yet you have the right to freedom of speech, and of publishing your sentiments. How long those rights will appertain to you, you yourselves are called upon to say, whether your houses shall continue to be your castles; whether your papers, your persons and your property, are to be held sacred and free from general warrants, you are now to determine. Whether the trial by jury is to continue as your birth-right, the freemen of Pennsylvania, nay, of all America, are now called upon to declare.
Without presuming upon my own judgement, I cannot think it an unwarrantable presumption to offer my private opinion, and call upon others for their’s, and if I use my pen with the boldness of a freeman, it is because I know that the liberty of the press yet remains unviolated, and juries yet are judges.
The late convention have submitted to your consideration a plan of a new federal government — The subject is highly interesting to your future welfare — Whether it be calculated to promote the great ends of civil society, viz. the happiness and prosperity of the community; it behoves you well to consider, uninfluenced by the authority of names. Instead of that frenzy of enthusiasm, that has actuated the citizens of Philadelphia, in their approbation of the proposed plan, before it was possible that it could be the result of a rational investigation into its principles; it ought to be dispassionately and deliberately examined, and its own intrinsic merit the only criterion of your patronage. If ever free and unbiased discussion was proper or necessary, it is on such an occasion. — All the blessings of liberty and the dearest privileges of freemen, are now at stake and dependent on your present conduct. Those who are competent to the task of developing the principles of government, ought to be encouraged to come forward, and thereby the better enable the people to make a proper judgment; for the science of government is so abstruse, that few are able to judge for themselves: without such assistance the people are too apt to yield an implicit assent to the opinions of those characters, whose abilities are held in the highest esteem, and to those in whose integrity and patriotism they can confide: not considering that the love of domination is generally in proportion to talents, abilities, and superior acquirements; and that the men of the greatest purity of intention may be made instruments of despotism in the hands of the artful and designing. If it were not for the stability and attachment which time and habit gives to forms of government it would be in the power of the enlightened and aspiring few, if they should combine, at any time to destroy the best establishments, and even make the people the instruments of their own subjugation.
The late revolution having effaced in a great measure all former habits, and the present institutions are so recent, that there exists not that great reluctance to innovation, so remarkable in old communities, and which accords with reason, for the most comprehensive mind cannot foresee the full operation of material changes-on civil polity; it is the genius of the common law to resist innovation.
The wealthy and ambitious, who in every community think they have a right to lord it over their fellow creatures, have availed themselves, very successfully, of this favorable disposition; for the people thus unsettled in their sentiments, have been prepared to accede to any extreme of government; all the distresses and difficulties they experience, proceeding from various causes, have been ascribed to the impotency of the present confederation, and thence they have been led to expect full relief from the adoption of the proposed system of government, and in the other event, immediately ruin and annihilation as a nation. These characters flatter themselves that they have lulled all distrust and jealousy of their new plan, by gaining the concurrence of the two men in whom America has the highest confidence, and now triumphantly exult in the completion of their long meditated schemes of power and aggrandisement. I would be very far from insinuating that the two illustrious personages alluded to, have not the welfare of their country at heart, but that the unsuspecting goodness and zeal of the one, has been imposed on, in a subject of which he must be necessarily inexperienced, from his other arduous engagements; and that the weakness and indecision attendant on old age, has been practiced on in the other.
I am fearful that the principles of government inculcated in Mr. Adams’s treatise, and enforced in the numerous essays and paragraphs in the newspapers, have misled some well designing members of the late Convention. — But it will appear in the sequel, that the construction of the proposed plan of government is infinitely more extravagant.
I have been anxiously expecting that some enlightened patriot would, ere this, have taken up the pen to expose the futility, and counteract the baneful tendency of such principles. Mr. Adams’s sine qua non of a good government is three balancing powers, whose repelling qualities are to produce an equilibrium of interests, and thereby promote the happiness of the whole community. He asserts that the administrators of every government, will ever be actuated by views of private interest and ambition, to the prejudice of the public good; that therefore the only effectual method to secure the rights of the people and promote their welfare, is to create an opposition of interests between the members of two distinct bodies, in the exercise of the powers of government, and balanced by those of a third. This hypothesis supposes human wisdom competent to the task of instituting three co-equal orders in government, and a corresponding weight in the community to enable them respectively to exercise their several parts, and whose views and interests should be so distinct as to prevent a coalition of any two of them for the destruction of the third. Mr. Adams, although he has traced the constitution of every form of government that ever existed, as far as history affords materials, has not been able to adduce a single instance of such a government; he indeed says that the British constitution is such in theory, but this is rather a confirmation that his principles are chimerical and not to be reduced to practice. If such an organization of power were practicable, how long would it continue? not a day — for there is so great a disparity in the talents, wisdom and industry of mankind, that the scale would presently preponderate to one or the other body, and with every accession of power the means of further increase would be greatly extended. The state of society in England is much more favorable to such a scheme of government than that of America. There they have a powerful hereditary nobility, and real distinctions of rank and interests; but even there, for want of that perfect equallity of power and distinction of interests, in the three orders of government, they exist but in name; the only operative and efficient check, upon the conduct of administration, is the sense of the people at large.